Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 The past remembered
- 2 W. G. Sebald: an act of restitution
- 3 Rolf Hochhuth: breaking the silence
- 4 Peter Weiss: the investigation
- 5 Arthur Miller: the rememberer
- 6 Anne Frank: everybody's heroine
- 7 Jean Améry: home and language
- 8 Primo Levi: from the darkness to the light
- 9 Elie Wiesel: to forget is to deny
- 10 Tadeusz Borowski: the world of stone
- 11 Memory theft
- Coda
- Notes
- Index
1 - The past remembered
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 The past remembered
- 2 W. G. Sebald: an act of restitution
- 3 Rolf Hochhuth: breaking the silence
- 4 Peter Weiss: the investigation
- 5 Arthur Miller: the rememberer
- 6 Anne Frank: everybody's heroine
- 7 Jean Améry: home and language
- 8 Primo Levi: from the darkness to the light
- 9 Elie Wiesel: to forget is to deny
- 10 Tadeusz Borowski: the world of stone
- 11 Memory theft
- Coda
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The pages before you are segments of contemplation and memory. Memory is elusive and selective: it holds onto what it chooses to hold on to … Very like a dream, memory takes specific details out of the viscous flow of events – sometimes tiny, seemingly insignificant details – stores them deeply away, and at certain times brings them to the surface. Like a dream, memory also tries to imbue events with some meaning … Memory and imagination sometimes dwell together … memory and oblivion, the sense of chaos and impotence on one side and the desire for a meaningful life on the other.
Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a LifeThe Russian writer Andrei Vosnesensky spoke of what he called a nostalgia for the present. For a man who had escaped repression, there was nothing to yearn for, no past to be burnished by memory. Instead, he projected himself forward, already imagining looking back on himself reborn. The idea of Eden offers a powerful metaphor of innocent beginnings, recapitulating, as it does, the processes of human development from child to adult, knowledge and sin becoming coterminous. Yet there are those born with the taste of the apple already in their infant mouths or at least those whose memories will not permit the notion of a paradise lost.
This book began with a desire to celebrate the work of W. G. Sebald, a friend and colleague. Max, as he was known to his friends, began writing late.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Remembering and Imagining the HolocaustThe Chain of Memory, pp. 1 - 24Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006